The main rational is explained in the commit message to 

[PATCH 4/5] lib: autocommit after some number of completed

I'm not super-happy with the documentation in [5/5], as it explains
things in terms of database concepts the user shouldn't really need to
understand.

[PATCH 5/5] doc: document database.autocommit variable

The default value of 8000 was chose not to cause any noticable
slowdown when indexing the "large" corpus of about 200k messages.  The
test machine is a recent Xeon with fast spinning rust drives; the
whole index takes about 8.5 minutes on this machine. I'd be curious if
other people notice a performance impact.  On the same machine the
threshold of 8000 means that less than 30 seconds worth of work would
be discarded.
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